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blacklion

1,082 karma · joined July 28, 2019

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blacklion··on Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
"blazingly fast" as in how much trading rules could you apply to 10Gbit/s stream of stock market data on one core? On one socket?

How 100Gbit NICs could your filter through your stateful firewall at line speed? And with 64 byte packets?

blacklion··on Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
But third item means that there are two organs almost by definition, so original headline maybe slightly sensationalist, but not technically false.
blacklion··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
I don't see LCD layer here. Passive color filters, B/W capsules (which reflects or doesn't reflect incoming light, depends on orientation), TFT (thin layer transistors, not LCD — liquid crystal display!) as control to orient capsules.

Yes, it is not 4 color capsules as in Spectra, but where is LCD?

LCD what is caught my attention (and surprise) in your commentary.

But now I see difference, thank you.

blacklion··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
They are used in book readers. Amazon Kindle Colorsoft, for example. Or I have android phone with such screen (though, not latest generation).

Rather opposite: I never seen consumer products with two-layer displays.

blacklion··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
Do you use AudioMoth embedded mic?
blacklion··on Compressing a flag to 11 bits
Fun fact: Constitution of Nepal has chapter about format of The Flag and it reads as geometry textbook problem (starred one, for advanced students).
blacklion··on Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
I'm surprised that all original firmwares were not protected at all.

I've tried to fix firmware of some cheap (but with good DAC and analog schematics) Chinese media player based on STM32 and firmware was protected by no-read fuses and only action possible in this case is to wipe flash, but not to read-out firmware.

And this scooter looks much more professionally-made and expensive product.

blacklion··on The case against JPEG XL
I think, whole idea of «web images» is silly now.

Browsers are new OSes.

There is no any «web» anymore. E-mail clients are web, news readers are web, image galleries are web, heck, even image editing software could be web (google:photopea).

And as such there should not be «web-optimized» formats anymore.

blacklion··on The case against JPEG XL
MPEG4 supports interactive 3D scenes (read: games!) via bit-encoded VRML which can include JavaScript. I don't know any software which support this features (even without interactivity), but it is here.

I'd wrote reader for this bit encoding many years ago when company I'd been employed at made custom VRML engine for Samsung featurephones (project was dead on arrival as at this moment smartphones / Android become available and all this lineage of featurephones was killed).

blacklion··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
But it is not for prosumer. I don't want my PC to be terminal to 4-5 providers of compute who could ban me or raise prices tenfold overnight.

I don't see any advances for me, only for my employer, maybe, but it is not sure thing too.

blacklion··on FFmpeg 9.0
It is interesting, that changes from 8.0 to 8.1 is more substantial than from 8.1 to 9.0.

I don't say it to mean "they did less work," no, what his interesting to me is choice of major version bump instead of minor one.

blacklion··on Multicast TV Distribution on My Home Network
In the theory, if you install DLNA renderer/controller (player) on TV you could make appropriate DLNA media source from VLC or, maybe, ffmpeg.

Put it on RPi (as it could skip transcodnig and pass media streams as-is) and put into the box :)

We are on HN, after all!

blacklion··on Multicast TV Distribution on My Home Network
IPTV from your ISP is typically multicast (even if your connection is point-to-point), and if you have more than one network behind your router (for example, you have separate networks for wire clients, owner's wifi and guests wifi) you need to understand hot it works to setup your router correctly that you can watch IPTV on any device in any of yours networks.
blacklion··on Frame – Linux X server in Assembly
This "hopelessly proprietary, and you have to pay to use it." is what scary me most.

How often there are stories "Google/Apple/Microsoft [but mostly Google] deactivate my account for some stupid reason and I lost everything: my business, my tax data, my client data, my developer account and access to my apps, everything".

With LLM/Coding agent providers it will be worse!

blacklion··on Electric anti-aircraft interceptor drone breaks world air speed record at 434mph
Rocket-like, yes. Like illustration from old "Amazing Stories" or other "pulp" magazine of golden age of SciFi :)
blacklion··on Electric anti-aircraft interceptor drone breaks world air speed record at 434mph
Yes, it is why last iteration by Luke Maximo & Father used trimmed-down propellers rotating really fast :-)
blacklion··on Electric anti-aircraft interceptor drone breaks world air speed record at 434mph
Interesting, that this form-factor was popularized by DIY builders. First one was dutch-built, sponsored by Red Bull after prototyping stage, to film Verstappen's full F1 lap (so semi-DIY, so to say), but then record was taken back and forth between two DIY builders — Ben Biggs in Australia and Luke Maximo and his father

Latest record by Ben Biggs was 626kph (389mph). Latest record by Luke Maximo was 655kph (408mph).

blacklion··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
> It's okay to receive salary though.

Are you sure? I'm paying 48% as income tax, and then 21% as VAT and some additional taxes on gasoline, electricity, LPG, car, motorcycle, house and water. Additionally I'm forced to buy health insurance and cannot pay for medicine out of my pocket, insurance is only way to go.

If I invest my money (buy ETF, for example) I need to pay tax on imputed income over my open positions on the stock market (no matter, goes actions/ETFs/options up or down, I pay for open positions, not for my income from these positions).

If I have more than 57K€ in the bank (with 0.5% interest when official inflation rate is about 4% and real one is more like 10-12%) I need to pay tax on that money (not for the interest earned, but for sum on the account!).

Looks like it is not Ok to receive salary if it is a notch above poverty level, too.

Oh, and now I need to pay duties (on top of VAT) on each purchase in non-EU internet shop, no matter how cheap it is, and there is minimal duty 4€ per item. So, buying something small but unique on AliExpress is very costly too. And it is not protection of local brands — because almost nothing is produced here, especially for DIY hobbies (my case, but I'm sure everybody can name other group of goods which has good selection over aboard).

I've get free samples of some technical fabrics from USA (could you buy then in EU, by meter and as privet persond and not a business? Nope) and payed 14€ to the state: like 2€ VAT on FedEx shipping costs (goods are FREE!) and 12€ fix to process this transaction. And, no, it is not FedEx fee, it is local custom fee, it it the same for official national post service. Nicccccce.

blacklion··on AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
Or it is low-grade crystal which cannot run on i5 speeds. Who knows.
blacklion··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
It is how Russia become what it is: we all be said «If you don't like new law/regulation, go to your beloved USA, you are not a patriot and must be punished».

I'm sorry, but Germany is democratic country, and citizen of the country can choose by definition.

Leave your motherland because your government is crazy in one way or another? It is nonsense.

In reality, sometimes people need to do it (because it becomes too dangerous to stay), but it should not be this way. In any country.

blacklion··on AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
Same with some old IBM hardware: two CPUs were installed in each box, but if you bought only 1 CPU server other one is disabled via firmware.
blacklion··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
You always could find deep niche where any high-level technology is not suitable.

I don't think you will program such device in C, rather in assembly, right? When you have like memory for 500 commands, it is easier to go directly to assembler, anyway, with such hardware as a target you don't need portability, this code is 100% hardware-dependable, at it is perfectly Ok.

BTW, which uC your have in mind when you talk about single-digit nA draw (in running state? in deep sleep?), because old 8-bit architectures typically are designed for older node processes and not as energy effective as new one, and draw in sleep doesn't depend much on RAM or FLASH size or architecture, it is more design philosophy.

Anyway, PIC16LF (20nA in deep sleep) or 8051 clone (50nA in deep sleep) or STM8 (~0.30 uA in halt) or ATtinys (100nA in deep sleep), which are covered by "768 bytes of flash and 64 bytes of RAM" description are comparable with EFM32 ARM32-M0+ (20nA in deep sleep), same with uA/Mhz, but ARM32-M0+ will do much more work for each Mhz, so it will be more efficient in the end (faster does all work and go to sleep again).

blacklion··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
> Because the last time I looked it appeared to need some godawful slow bytecode interpreter that took up thousands of kilobytes of RAM.

Did you looked at java 1.2 at 1998 last time? Because after that there is compiler which produce some very efficient profile-guide-optimized code and do tricks like de-virtualization which is not possible with static compiler with support of multiple compilation units (like C++).

Really, there was time in history when HotSpot-compiled JVM bytecode was faster than everything that gcc could produce for comparable tasks. Yes, now this gap is reversed again, as both gcc and clang become much more clever, but still gap is not very wide now.

blacklion··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
> Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.

It is very dubious way to subvert GPL, even GPL2, not to mention [A]GPL3.

It was discussed many times that you cannot have close-sourced plugin for GPL host program, as loading plugin is linkage and it is covered by full GPL (only LGPL has linkage exclusion).

blacklion··on My phone replaced a brass plug
I like author's style / voice. Very soothing, very humane.

Is it is consistent for old posts too, I hope it is not LLM :)

blacklion··on Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
This extension piggyback SQLite native transactions. For example, queueing data will be rolled back if transaction is rolled back due to some constrains violations.

It is possible to achieve with external IPC, but require a lot of very careful programming.

blacklion··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
I wish Thunderbird fix their plain text editor (it is at level of old Notepad, and chrome for it looks ugly, and line wrapping is a mess, especially with in-line quotation), add ability to store Folder properties (including Identity used for this folder, retention period and such) as IMAP properties and not locally to have same settings on different devices.

And, yes, proper support for Sieve, including per-folder Sieve. Sieve is a pain after they changed something and 3rd party Sieve plugin died (become Electorn Application).

Now Thunderbird has so many rough edges (I named only my top-3, but I'm sure anybody can add others!), but still one and only usable cross-platform e-mail client.

Oh, yes, development pace is unbearable slow: after killing "Manually sort folders" plugin it takes more than year (!) to add this as "core" feature with huge help from aforementioned plugun's author. Very slow process of review, integrating, releasing which takes MONTHS to integrate ready feature. It should be very discouraging for contributors.

Thunderbird now provide like 10% of features of old and almost forgotten (but still alive) windows-only client "The Bat!" from end of 1990s, beginning of 2000s and was written by team of like 5 people.

But still, I've donated!

blacklion··on Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)
I nominate Adobe to the worst corp. in the world of software.

Fusion360 at least works on Linux

Photoshop/Lightroom don't.

blacklion··on Optimizing a lock-free ring buffer
Yep, you are right, more precise, and precision is very important in this topic.

I stand corrected.

blacklion··on Optimizing a lock-free ring buffer
write with release semantic cannot be reordered with any other writes, dependent or not.

Relaxed atomic writes can be reordered in any way.

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